A Few Thoughts…

So, for our final paper for Advanced OS, we have to come up with a topic within the realm of advanced operating systems, and write an 8-page single-spaced paper. Of course, I have a lot of interests in operating systems – though not a lot of them were covered in the course (we focused mostly on file systems and P2P systems). So, I managed to narrow my topic list to two pretty quickly:

• Scheduling & Locking in Real-Time Operating Systems
• Methods of Reconfigurable Computing (software based of course)

After looking through literature for a while, I think I have decided on the later. Reconfigurable computing has been a fairly prevalent topic in the supercomputing literature in the last few years, so there were a lot of papers to choose from. So, stay tuned – by next wednesday, I’ll have a paper posted here for all (two) of you who take a look here…

So my lecture on DSM will be on Wednesday, and staying true to the academic form, below is a link to the presentation. It’s a summary of an article by Pete Keleher, et. al. (from 1994) and we’re presenting them in a manner akin to a conference presentation (so there are no citations given). This is the first draft, so there may be mistakes – please let me know about them if you find them!

The paper: TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems

My Presentation: Interactive Quicktime (I’ll probably put the keynote version up here eventually)

So the end of the quarter is approaching – and I seem to be busier than I think I ever have been before in my life! So many papers to read, and so many to write! I do my lecture on Wednesday on a paper written in 1994 on a distributed shared memory system. Yeah, you may think it’s old and outdated in the speed at which computer systems go, but you’d be wrong. There’s a lot of landmark papers written many years ago which maintain their relevance even today.

Anyway, I need to spend a lot of time preparing this lecture, but I have another paper to write for monday – on the longest paper we have been assigned. It’s 40 pages long, and not a whole lot of diagrams – at least, not yet! I’m about 1/4 of the way through it, so maybe it will pick up. It’s just really hard to focus on the paper when I known I really need to be focusing on mine!

It’s also becomming increasingly difficult to find a good place to study. I feel like I spend 90% of my time outside of work at either Panera or Barnes & Noble. Don’t get me wrong – both fine establishments. Panera is certainly the better place to study since it’s much quieter and has free internet access. However, they close at 8:30, which is a rough time to stop studying! Luckily B&N is just across the street, and they stay open later – though no free internet access means no wikipedia! And don’t even get me started on their technical material anymore – it was never huge, but now it’s downright minimalistic!

Okay, I think a 13 hour day of HTG work and studying is enough for me. I’m gonna go home, and relax for a little while before going to bed. Luckily I just have to bring snack for Sunday School tomorrow! Hopefully it will be a very productive day and I can get my presentation pretty much completed.

I need to test the display with my laptop – it will be the first time I’ve done a presentation on a mac, and I have to say, I’m really liking Keynote. It seems like things are MUCH easier than powerpoint. File saves take a little bit of time, but that may just be the images I’m putting into it. Sure, sure, call me a mac fanboy, but when it comes to useability, they’ve got their ducks in a row.

[Backdated since B&N doesn't have the wifi]

I was reading around digg this morning and came across a post entitled “Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap” which discusses how many entrepreneurs fail when they try to stake their claim of the billion-dollar business that is the mobile phone software market. At first, this was somewhat disparaging to me, since I have an idea for HTG that would fit into this category. But as I read, and I started thinking about the market they were talking about, and the market I was thinking about, I was relieved.
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